The two-day meeting of NATO leaders in Ankara, Turkey, which ended on Wednesday, was a tale of two summits.
The first belonged to President Trump, who dominated the news cycle with a steady stream of complaints, grievances and insults aimed at his NATO colleagues, with his unpredictable changes of tone and mood, and with his decision during the meeting to unleash new airstrikes against Iran.
As usual, Mr. Trump’s targets were many — the alliance itself, some of its leaders, their various failures to show loyalty to him, the Spaniards and the Iranians.
But the second summit belonged to the alliance itself, as it worked to show its commitments to more military spending, more trans-Atlantic industrial cooperation and continued support of Ukraine in its war with Russia.
That summit was marked by a kind of quiet, steady progress toward a new kind of NATO, the one Mr. Trump says he wants, where Europeans would take primary responsibility for the conventional defense of the continent, letting Washington concentrate its resources on the threat of a rising China.
“It really is a tale of two summits,” said Ian Lesser, a distinguished fellow of the German Marshall Fund, based in Brussels. “You have all the preexisting concerns about the Trump agenda, some on display yesterday, as he ticked off all his grievances,” he said, speaking on Wednesday.
“And then there is the more traditional summit, with a preset agenda, which is a lot about money and how to spend it, which declared support in the communiqué for collective defense and Ukraine, and that was important,” Mr. Lesser continued, referring to the document issued at the end of the gathering.
“It was odd to have these two summits at once, as if in two parallel lanes,” he said. He noted that Mr. Trump’s good relationship with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey helped “to keep it relatively calm.”
European leaders mostly shrugged off Mr. Trump’s insults and invectives, in large part because they were familiar and not coupled, at least in Ankara, to specific threats or actions that could undermine the alliance.
Mr. Trump’s “repeated insults and empty threats are wearing off,” said Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe. “If he were to say we’re pulling 40,000 troops out of Europe, something specific, that would really rattle. But so long as it’s adjectives and vague threats, it’s not so meaningful.”
She said Mr. Trump’s summit was “a political show,” adding that it was “supposed to be the main show, but it isn’t.”
“There is concrete stuff happening at the alliance level,” she said.
Jana Puglierin, who runs the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr. Trump’s hostile talk about Europe still has an impact.
“It is eroding trust in America, but, to an extent, other leaders are getting used to it,” she said. But when combined with concrete actions like American withdrawals of some troops and military systems, she said, it isn’t just rhetoric.
Still, she said, Europeans are finally convinced that NATO “has to change and adapt in order to survive.”
“There is an increasing realization and pragmatism about the need for more European troops and resources,” she continued, “to make sure that NATO is not completely paralyzed by a Russian provocation that the U.S. decides not to see.”
The irony is that while Mr. Trump remains fixated on what he says are the faults of the alliance, NATO is working hard in its quieter way to transform itself precisely as the president is demanding.
In Ankara on Tuesday, the alliance highlighted intensive new trans-Atlantic cooperation among military-industrial companies, which are investing to attract the large amounts of new spending the allies are providing under American pressure. For Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, this is another way to show Mr. Trump that American companies and interests are benefiting from NATO’s new commitments.
On Tuesday, he said, allies sealed $50 billion in new weapons deals and agreed to invest 27 billion euros, or around $31 billion, in fuel storage and distribution pipelines, including on NATO’s eastern flank.
Mr. Rutte has already done his best — through flattery, in part — to show Mr. Trump that the allies were paying up. Visiting him in Washington before the summit, he presented charts in the Oval Office showing over $1.2 trillion in extra defense expenditure since Mr. Trump’s first term, including a 20 percent increase in 2025. One chart was titled in golden capital letters: “THE TRUMP TRILLION.”
Last year, at NATO’s summit in The Hague, allies thought that committing to spend much more money on defense — 5 percent of national income by 2035 — would appease Mr. Trump. But this year made it clear that money is not enough. Mr. Trump renewed his threat to seize Greenland, the territory of a NATO ally, and complained indignantly that allies did not support his and Israel’s war in Iran, even though he did not inform them about it or ask for their aid.
The frustration among other leaders is that Mr. Trump somehow refuses “to grab the win,” as Mr. Rutte urged him in Ankara.
By the end of the summit on Wednesday, in his closing news conference, Mr. Trump was more emollient. He said the summit had displayed “a lot of love” and “a lot of unity,” and he went out of his way to praise Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Rutte. According to President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Trump did not berate allies in Wednesday’s closed session, though he strongly emphasized the need for Europeans to be serious about more military spending.
On the plane back to Washington, Mr. Trump had a few more nice words for the alliance. “We had some good sessions,” he said. “I think NATO came a long way today.”
But what is most striking is the divergence between the messages of Mr. Rutte and those of Mr. Trump, said Torrey Taussig, a former official on the National Security Council and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Allies are stepping up with more money and production and support for Ukraine, she said. “But the U.S. and Trump are in their own show,” she said, “with the president showing up to rant at allies.”
Mr. Trump “has won the argument that Europe has to step up and spend more, and that’s a huge achievement,” she said. “But they can’t land the win, which is to lead the alliance and stay politically engaged and give Europe the consistency and stability it needs to plan. Instead we’re not getting that, we’re getting the Trump show.”
In the end, she said, “the Americans are shouting in the wind here and the Europeans are moving on.”
Sinan Ulgen, a former career Turkish diplomat and security analyst, also spoke of how the summit was “a Trump show, with all his theatrics.”
“But that doesn’t change the reality that NATO is undergoing and will need to undergo a transformation, and it will come out in a way that rebalances U.S. and European contributions,” he said. “Ideally, we’ll look at a weaker, transformed NATO, but one that is good enough.”
